RE: GNOME hacking recomentation book.

[Caolan McNamara <Caolan McNamara ul ie>]

On 30-Sep-99 Miguel de Icaza wrote:
>
>Hello guys,
>
>   I got a copy of the "Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft
>Windows", it is a pretty good book that you might want to read if you
>want to improve your application user interface.
>
>   While I was reading it, I kept thinking "This book was written
>basically for us".
>
>   Various of the discussions we have had recently on user interfaces
>and why I believe our current GNOME code must be revamped to make
>sense are covered in this book. 

I dont personally know of that book, but I very much reccomend (though it
very likely you've read it already) Macintosh human interface guidelines 
([by Apple Computer, Inc.].. - Reading, Mass : Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1992.)

Very spiffy indeed. Lots of good stuff about language support, and color
issues. One small example that was of note to me the last time I looked at it 
was making sure that dropdown list widgets should have the capacity to scroll if
the no of elements is too long to fit on screen (Xaw xfontsel vs Xaw3d xfontsel 
for an example of this one). And so on, some interesting discussion of making
dialogs automatically mirror themselves when the LOCALE is one where the text
is written right to left. i.e. a dialog with [cancel ok] for english readers 
becomes [ok cancel] for right to left readers, nice stuff.

C.

Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan    *  Sig: an oblique strategy
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